I have been specializing in building web-based applications since 1998, primarily using HTML, Flex, LiveCycle, Java, ColdFusion, and SQL Server.
You found yourself here, so hopefully you'll get something good out of it!
Enjoy...

Friday, January 26, 2007

Brandon Purcell from Adobe put together a great article discussing flex performance and optimization. This articles includes many tips and tricks, along with general best practices to increase client performance.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

I recently ran into an issue with Flex Builder where the Problems tab wasn't accurately reporting information. It would show me the error, but it would simply show the project name under the resource column.

All the normal attempts to resolve the issue didn't work including cleaning the project, recreating the project, and even reinstalling Flex Builder (w/2.0.1). Finally, the only thing that resolved it was deleting all of the files and rebuilding my source code from SVN.

Saturday, January 20, 2007

Here's another extremely useful script that lists column information for all tables in a given database. The attached view contains just about anything related to a column definition in SQL Server 2000. The query that you'll see after the view definition contains the following columns.

Table Name

Column Name

Type (and size if applicable)

Nullability

Default Value

Description

There is a lot more information that you can gleam from the view, but the above are the basics that I find really handy.

Here's another old but handy script that will list out extended properties on all tables for a given database. This comes in handy for documentation purposes, or to simply learn more about your db if your tables have any extended properties.

Quite some time back I put together a script for SQL Server 2000 that lists out all of the primary key to foreign key relationships. It's a simple script that generates a nice little listing which can be used to get a better understanding of a new database, or simply an easy way to help document an existing one.

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

I saw this on Digg, but figured it was worth mentioning. Apparently Microsoft chose to use the same html rendering engine in outlook that word uses, so get ready for a dumbed-down feature set. You need to be aware of this if you're sending out any html formatted emails. Here is a snippet of what you need to be aware of:

Monday, January 08, 2007

Microsoft SQL Server by default is case-insensitive which for the most part is very handy when searching and sorting data. There are times though where this isn't ideal, such as managing usernames or passwords.

If you take a look at the DDL of a table, you'll notice that most of your text-based columns including char and varchar fields use "COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS". If you would like certain columns to be case sensitive you will want to use "COLLATE SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS" for your column definition. Please note the substitution of CI for CS in the collation statement.

If you don't have the option to change your column definition, there are a few other options to consider such as casting your columns to varbinary values when performing searches.

Friday, January 05, 2007

My most recent project involves WebFocus from Information Builders. Although WebFocus is a very powerful platform, the client was still using a fairly old version so we opted to move the application to SQL Server. This in itself was quite a task as WebFocus doesn't offer an ODBC connector to pull data out of it's proprietary database.

WebFocus allows you to export data directly to SQL Server, Excel, CSV, and many other file formats or database systems, but migrating a real world application out of WebFocus wasn't nearly as simple as they lead you to believe.

In comes Data Integrator, a product from Pervasive. Data Integrator is a very powerful tool that allows you to move data to-and-from roughly 150 different file formats and database platforms. Data Integrator allows you to build an easy and reproducible process to migrate data out of your legacy applications.

This white paper about Intuit shows the true power available within Pervasive's suite of products, and I highly recommend taking a look if you find yourself needing to migrate a legacy application. Although the white paper shows an extraordinary use of their products, they can be used to simplify even the most basic of integration projects.

Feel free to ping me at michael@omnicypher.com if you find yourself heading down this road. I would be more than happy to help out and/or share some of my experiences with this process.